Booster Raises Another $56 Million To Bring The Pump To You In A Post-Gas Station World

Nearly every service is available on demand, and the future of personal mobility is electrified and shared. So the automotive fuel industry has some adapting to do. San Mateo, California-based Booster got on the delivery road quickly, entering the market in 2015 from its then-headquarters in San Francisco and eventually scaling to bring gas to fleets and to individual consumer clients in northern and southern California and the Dallas-Fort Worth region in Texas.

Booster founder and chief executive Frank Mycroft is aware of the competition. Right now his only overlap in area of service is with Yoshi in Dallas-Fort Worth, but he is confident he will win his niche when he meets the other players down the road. Unlike Neighborhood Fuel, which only serves individual customers at pre-registered home and work addresses and Yoshi, which offers a subscription for a suite of services, Booster is à la carte and on-demand anywhere you go with its "find and fuel" functionality. This Booster-made video shows the user experience:

In a phone interview, Mycroft said his current consumer offering further primes his operation for a future of distributed fleets:

A fleet these days is a bunch of mobile addresses that are moving all over. And using smart technology, we can find fleets be it a more conventional fleet or one of these more modern [gig economy-related] ones and fuel it at the point of time of greatest need and opportunistically, lowest cost for us. So for instance, it's a busy Friday night in San Francisco and we can fuel Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Grubhub vehicles in concentrated locations where you could never efficiently fuel them before."

Long-term strategy will get input from mammoth French energy multinational Total and from U.S. fleet efficiency veteran Enterprise. Both firms' venture arms were strategic investors in this round.

Booster will use its new capital to follow enterprise clients into new markets while continuing to develop consumer business. Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and the eastern seaboard are certain locations for the next launches.

Meanwhile, gas stations continue to struggle. Apart from multimodal transportation decreasing demand at the actual pump, Postmates and Amazon Prime skim customers from the mini-convenience store one used to browse at most gas stations. Those marked-up sundries provide a critical profit margin for high-overhead gas stations.

The worse the business environment gets for gas stations, the more will close, and the longer the drive to find one will be. That's where Mycroft sees opportunity. "The pain point of getting gas is just getting worse," he said. "I think as you see more alternative sources come into markets, that's only going to accelerate that."